Frederick Greenwood
“The kindly spirit which thinks no ill looks out of her pages irradiate; and while we read them, we breathe the purer intelligence that prefers to deal with emotions and passions which have a living root in minds within the pale of salvation, and not with those that rot without it. This spirit is more especially declared in Cousin Phillis and Wives and Daughters—their author’s latest works; they seem to show that for her the end of life was not descent among the clods of the valley, but ascent into the purer air of the heaven-aspiring hills.
“We are saying nothing of the merely intellectual qualities displayed in these later works. Twenty years to come, that may be thought the more important question of the two; in the presence of her grave we cannot think so; but it is true, all the same, that as mere works of art and observation, these later novels of Mrs. Gaskell’s are among the finest of our time. There is a scene in Cousin Phillis—where Holman, making hay with his men, ends the day with a psalm—which is not excelled as a picture in all modern fiction; and the same may be said of that chapter of this last story in which Roger smokes a pipe with the Squire after the quarrel with Osborne. There is little in either of these scenes, or in a score of others which succeed each other like gems in a cabinet, which the ordinary novel-maker could ‘seize.’ There is no ‘material’ for him in half a dozen farming men singing hymns in a field, or a discontented old gentleman smoking tobacco with his son; still less could he avail himself of the miseries of a little girl sent to be happy in a fine house full of fine people; but it is just in such things as these that true genius appears brightest and most unapproachable.” (Cornhill Magazine, 1865.)